Fugelsang slams Cheney: ‘You did nothing’ to prevent 9/11 attacks

By David Ferguson/Raw Story

Tuesday night on John Fugelsang’s “Viewpoint,” Fugelsang invited viewers to play along at home as he hosted a new game, “Are You Qualified to Criticize Obama on This?”

Along with actor Frank Coniff, who played “TV’s Frank” on the show “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” Fugelsang lampooned former Vice President Dick Cheney (R)’s recent comments attacking the Obama administration.

“All of Mr. Cheney’s clips come courtesy of ‘The Sean Hannity Show,’” Fugelsang said, “where Sean lubed up his nose for Mr. Cheney’s phone-in interview to call the 9/11/12 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi ‘one of the worst incidents I can recall in my career.’”

He then rolled interview audio of Cheney, who claimed “the State Department and the White House ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the threat” to the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

“So, is Dick Cheney qualified to criticize Barack Obama on this?” Fugelsang asked. A “wrong answer” buzzer sounded and Fugelsang said, “Ooh, sorry, Dick. You see, back on August 6, 2001, your administration was given a presidential daily briefing literally titled, ‘Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.,’” a warning that the Bush administration ignored.

“The CIA warned you for months, you did nothing,” Fugelsang continued. “Bush continued his month-long vacation, and after 9/11 — the greatest security failure in national history — the one person in your administration who should’ve been fired — your national security advisor — was promoted to secretary of state. Which means some of us can criticize Barack Obama, but you ignored more warnings than Andy Dick’s agent.”

Watch the video, embedded below via Current TV:

Media Barred From Photographing Romney With Cheney At Fundraiser

By Ben Armbruster/Think Progress


Dick Cheney hosted a fundraiser for Mitt Romney last night at his home in Wyoming. Donors paid $1,000 to attend a reception, $10,000 for a picture with Romney and $30,000 to eat dinner with Romney and Cheney in the former vice president’s home. While reporters were on hand to cover some of the events, media were not allowed to take photos of Cheney and Romney together. The Los Angeles Times explains:

Because of the unpopularity of Bush and Cheney, Romney has kept his distance — never appearing publicly with either man during his 2012 campaign. Though both leaders are admired by many in the Republican Party base, any perception of closeness with Romney could be harmful as the unofficial Republican nominee seeks to draw in independent and moderate voters.

Indeed, it seems that Romney has been playing a double game this campaign season in an effort to draw away any attention to his neocon-inspired foreign policy. In public, he eitherchooses to ignore national security issues or he and his advisers don’t distinguish the presumptive GOP nominee’s foreign policy from President Obama’s too much.

Behind the scenes, however, it’s quite a different story. As Bush administration Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell noted recently, Romney’s foreign policy advisers “are quite far to the right.” Many of them advocated for the Iraq war and now want war with Iran.

And the ones who want war reportedly have Romney’s ear as one top Republican operativetold Reuters recently that the moderate camp inside Romney’s foreign policy team “are very concerned about the fact that if Romney needs to call anyone, his instinct is to call the Cheney-ites.” Another Romney aide, Vin Weber — who has received scrutiny for lobbying for countries with poor human rights records — told the Washington Post that “it’s inevitable” that the Bush-Cheney alumni advising Romney on foreign policy are going to “have some influence.”

Cheney praised Romney last night as the “only” candidate to make what he thinks are the right foreign policy decisions as commander-in-chief. In fact, Romney shares Cheney’s views on a number of national security issues, as Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) observed in an article in Foreign Policy yesterday: “A Romney presidency promises to take us back to something all too familiar: a Bush-Cheney doctrine — equal parts naïve and cavalier — which eagerly embraces military force without fully considering the consequences.”

Romney praises Cheney’s ‘wisdom and judgment’

By David Edwards/Raw Story

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney Wednesday gave voters in Arizona some insight into what kind of vice presidential running mate he would select.

The former Massachusetts governor told a town hall in Sun Lakes, Arizona he would pick someone who "could be president" like former Vice President Dick Cheney.

"I think it was last weekend I was watching C-SPAN, and I saw Vice President Dick Cheney and he was being asked questions about a whole host of issues -- following 9/11, the affairs in various countries in the world," Romney recalled, according to NBC's First Read.

"And I listened to him speak and said whether you agree or disagree with him, this a man of wisdom and judgment, and he could have been president of the United States," he said, adding, "That's the kind of person I'd like to have -- a person of wisdom and judgment."

At the same time, Romney did not rule out picking a "tea party person" for the VP slot.

Romney has also called Cheney's 2009 criticism of President Barack Obama's national security policy "direct, well-reasoned, and convincing."

While the former vice president didn't endorse Romney in 2008, his daughter, Liz, did join the candidate's campaign.

Cheney, who left office with a 13 percent approval rating, has not said who he will support in 2012.

‘War criminal!’: Ron Paul backers crash Cheney-Rumsfeld reunion

By Daniel Tencer

Supporters of libertarian Republican Ron Paul shouted down former Vice President Dick Cheney at a conservative conference Thursday, in a sign of a growing foreign policy rift on the American right.

Cheney had appeared on the first day of the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference to introduce Donald Rumsfeld, the former Bush-era defense secretary who was scheduled to receive this year's "Defender of the Constitution Award."

That didn't sit well with "Team Paul," supporters of Rep. Ron Paul who have long called for an end to the US's foreign wars.

"Where's bin Laden?" one heckler shouted as Cheney stood at the podium to introduce Rumsfeld.

"War criminal!" another shouted out, prompting a heated reaction from the crowd.

The specter of a Republican vice president being called a "war criminal" at a conservative conference was so unexpected that it promptedTalkingPointsMemo's Evan McMorris-Santoro to describe it as "what a Cheney-Rumsfeld hug at the Netroots Nation convention might look like."

"Uh, Defender of the Constitution?" activist Justin Bradfield told McMorris-Santoro. "Let's see: he expanded the Defense Department more than pretty much any other defense secretary and he enforced the Patriot Act."

Reporting from the Washington, DC, event, McMorris-Santoro estimated that the number of libertarian Paul supporters had grown from previous years, an assertion backed by Bradfield, who suggested that "half" the attendees were libertarians like himself.

Rumsfeld's "Defender of the Constitution" award has been ridiculed by liberal anti-war activists and libertarians alike, who argue that Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials were among the most dismissive of constitutional rights.

Rumsfeld, who was Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006, oversaw the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was replaced by current Defense secretary Robert Gates after a number of generals called for his resignation.

In 2005, he was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union for authorizing the torture and abuse of detainees at facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ACLU claimed that the Constitution prohibited the Secretary of Defense from adopting or permitting policies of cruelty against civilians in US military custody, but Rumsfeld claimed he could not be held legally liable for the torture. The case was eventually dismissed.

Rumsfeld recently released his memoir, in which he said his biggest regret was not stepping down after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. He said he should have forced then president George W. Bush to accept his resignation over the revelations of abuse by US military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Rumsfeld ended up staying in office for another two-and-a-half years until Bush sacked him following a Republican defeat in 2006 legislative elections in which the unpopular Iraq war played a major role.

-- With earlier reporting by Eric W. Dolan and a report from AFP

The following video was posted to YouTube by Mediaite.

The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality

By FRANK RICH

The opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)

Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.

Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.

But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.

There’s a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,” not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is repackaged with an alibi. The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce.

Rove’s overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security. Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.”

Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.

This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.

This is hardly the only recent example of Republicans’ distancing themselves from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey, doesn’t even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on “key issues” as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform. Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” a euphemism for “aggressive” and “unconstitutional” war. Paul’s son, Rand, who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is leading the polls in Kentucky’s G.O.P. Senate primary and has been endorsed by Sarah Palin.

In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still must be challenged. As we’ve learned the hard way, little fictions, whether about “death panels” or “uranium from Africa,” can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney’s unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news.

What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an Iraq election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome; the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier Iran. If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in the Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin their own failings on their successors.

Obama may well make — or is already making — his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the “blinking red” alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove’s propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about Saddam’s imminent “mushroom clouds.” The ensuing Iraq war allowed those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond — and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.

The Iran piece of the back story doesn’t end there. As The Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidiaries until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of the more egregious “intelligence” on Saddam’s W.M.D. used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.

Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq’s election, meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to facilitate Iran’s influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times reported on Chalabi’s ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week, fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire process. It’s no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove’s memoir.

If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.

Correction: An earlier version of this column incorrectly referred to Halliburton's business dealings with Tehran. Until 2007, the company did business in Iran through foreign subsidiaries, not foreign subsidies.

Dem lawmaker smacks Cheney: ‘Political diarrhea of the mouth’

By David Edwards and Sahil Kapur WASHINGTON -- Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) on Wednesday delivered a fervent and stinging rebuke to former Vice President Dick Cheney's recent attack on President Obama after the failed Christmas bombing.

"I am sick and tired of the former vice president of the United States taking shots not only at this administration, for problems he was largely and personally responsible for, but by an extension at those of us who served in the military and bring that experience," Massa said on MSNBC's The Ed Show.

"This man suffers from a horrible case of political Tourette's [syndrome], and it's about time that we stand up and kick right back because I'm sick and tired of him kicking us in our shins," Massa said.

Cheney's forceful critique of Obama quickly garnered significant media attention, and several journalists accused the story's author Mike Allen of failing to fact-check Cheney's seemingly curious claims.

"We need to grow a spine and stand up and show America exactly who did what," Massa said, pointing to Cheney's role in the events leading to the Christmas day attempt and the fact that the Bush administration took several days longer than Obama to address the 2001 shoe-bomber incident.

"It was Dick Cheney personally responsible for the release of the masterminds of the Christmas airline terror plot," he said, accusing the former vice president of shifting his culpability to Democrats.

"It makes no difference what we do, this man suffers from political diarrhea of the mouth, and unless we stand up and call it as it is he's going to keep on getting away with it," Massa said.

Host Ed Schultz called Cheney a "coward" and heatedly rebuffed the GOP meme that their party is more effective on national security, and said the Democratic Party cedes ground by failing to counter these claims.

"What do we have to do to get the Democrats to be aggressive on security?" Schultz said. "We got hit on [the GOP's] watch. They were told that bin Laden was going to do this and they sat on their fat ass on vacation and did nothing about it."

Massa agreed, saying that "this is not a political problem, it's a national security issue -- and for the Republicans to come out swinging and make this a political issue is the height of absolute arrogance and the depth of incompetence."

In a direct challenge to Cheney, Massa added: "I want Dick Cheney to come debate me, anywhere, anytime, anyhow -- and let's see how he stands up to the truth."

The New York Democrat also lashed out at Sen. Jim DeMint as "personally responsible for placing you, the traveling American public at risk" by "placing a hold on the nominee of the director of the Transportation Security Agency."

"People like Jim DeMint and people like Dick Cheney need to go away so we can solve the problems they've created," Massa said.

This video is from MSNBC's The Ed Show, broadcast Dec. 30, 2009.

Cheney Joins Hypocritical Attacks On Obama’s ‘Low Key Response’ To Failed Terrorist Attack

By Matt Corley For the past few days, Republicans such as Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and former Bush adviser Karl Rove have been aggressively criticizing the Obama administration’s response to the failed terrorist attack on Christmas Day. “I’m disappointed it’s taken the president 72 hours to even address this issue,” said King on Monday. As ThinkProgress and others have noted, such attacks are supremely hypocritical considering that no Republicans complained when it took President Bush six days to comment on the similarly failed shoe bomber attack. But according to Politico, King and Hoekstra won’t concede that they’re holding Obama to a double standard:

The Democrats’ counterattack is aimed largely at two Republican congressmen who have been particularly critical of Obama, Reps. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) and Peter King (R-N.Y.). But neither GOP lawmaker will concede applying a double standard to Obama. [...]

Asked Tuesday about how Obama’s response differed from Bush’s, King said it was his “recollection” that senior Bush Administration officials such as Attorney General John Ashcroft did speak out about Reid’s case soon after he was arrested. However, POLITICO could not locate any public comment from Ashcroft before he held a press conference when Reid was indicted nearly a month later.

“My point was there was no word coming from anyone except a press handout,” King told POLITICO Tuesday. “It didn’t have to be the president. I’d have been fine if it were Eric Holder or for that matter [Homeland Security Secretary Janet] Napolitano….There should be a face for the administration. For the first 48 hours, nobody said a word.”

Though he pointed out Hoekstra and King’s hypocrisy, Politico’s Josh Gerstein claimed that “former Bush aides and advisers have sidestepped the issue or endorsed Obama’s approach.” But in a statement given to a different Politico reporter, former Vice President Dick Cheney harshly criticized Obama’s “low key response“:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

Cheney’s claim that the Obama administration’s response to the attempted airline bombing is “trying to pretend we are not at war” is especially hypocritical because one of the Bush administration’s first public comments on the 2001 attempted shoe bombing specifically called it a “law enforcement” issue. At a press conference five days after the incident, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld brushed off questions about Richard Reid’s failed bombing by saying, “That’s a matter that’s in the hands of the law enforcement people and not the Department of Defense.” “And I don’t have anything I would want to add,” said Rumsfeld.

Update Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) blasted Cheney today, saying "that the apparent leaders of the al Qaeda cell in Yemen were 2 terrorists who were released by Vice President Cheney in secret." "I think there's a level of accountability that has to be levied personally on the vice president," said Massa.

Update White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer responds to Cheney on the White House blog, saying that "this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country." M.C.L comment: A quick recap between the two administration regarding terrorist attacks Bush/Cheney: 3,000 dead and a increase in global terrorism Obama/Biden:0 But all honesty why does the media still act like Dick Cheney is a authority in the terrorist fighting arena when 3,000 Americans died under Dick Cheney and his puppet watch? That's like someone asking Jerry Springer how to run a respectable talk show, Dick Cheney nor his spawn Liz Cheney have no credibility to lecture anyone regarding fighting terrorism.